Towards a Theory of the Self-Organization of Objects

Three of the central claims of my onticology are 1) that objects are always composed of other objects, 2) that objects exist at all levels of scale, and 3) that objects are negentropic in that they both resist dissolution and perpetually face the problem of dissolution or entropy. I draw the first two claims from Graham’s thought. The second claim is the thesis that corporations such as the Coca Cola corporation, for example, are no less objects than quarks, acorns, or stars, and that electrons are no less objects than rocks. These claims commit me to the thesis that objects are emergent or self-organizing. If it is true that objects are always composed of other objects, then it follows that I need some account of self-organization or emergence that allows us to think the transition from a mere aggregate, to a genuine object. This boundary, of course, will be fuzzy (all of the paradoxes that the Greeks encountered surrounding questions of when a pile becomes a hill will arise because there will be, drawing on Husserl’s concept, fuzzy essences).

Questions of self-organization, in their turn, will be deeply related to questions of entropy because the formation of an object will refer to the emergence of order in the world. It will be recalled that entropy is a measure of probability. The more probable it is that a particle (or other object) is located in any particular place in, for example, a chamber, the higher the degree of entropy a system possesses. The less probable it is that particles will be found in a particular place in the chamber, the lower the entropy of the system. The video below provides a nice visual illustration of entropy:

As time passes the entropy of the system increases because it become equally probable that particles of the system will be located at any particular place in the chamber. In other words, there’s a high probability that the particles will be located at any particular place in the chamber.

read on!
The relationship between entropy and objects here becomes a little clearer. An object is an entity that has a very low degree of entropy because it’s elements (smaller scale objects) are arranged in a particular patterned organization that maintains itself over time. The emergence of an object is accompanied by a decrease in entropy. In The Allure of Machinic Life John Johnston theorizes a beautiful way of thinking about this in terms of the information Claude Shannon and the cybernetician Heinz von Foester. Here I hope I’ll be forgiven for quoting at length. Johnston writes that,

[f]or von Foerster, a self-organizing system [what I call an object] is one whose “internal order” increases over time. This immediately raises the double problem of how this order is to be measured and how the boundary between the system and the environment is to be defined and located. The second problem is provisionally solved by defining the boundary “at any instant of time as beingthe envelope of that region in space which shows the desired increase in order.” For measuring order, von Foerster finds that Claude Shannon’s definition of “redundancy” in a communication system is “tailor-made.” In Shannon’s formula,

R = 1 – H/Hm, (“m” here is a subscript)

where R is the measure of redundancy and H/Hm the ratio of entropy H of an information source to its maximum value Hm. Accordingly, if the system is in a state of maximum disorder (i.e., H is equal to Hm), then R is equal to zero– there is no redundancy and therefore no order. If, however, the elements in the system are arranged in such a way that, “given one element, the position of all other elements are determined”, then the system’s entropy H (which is really the degree of uncertainty about these elements) vanishes to zero. R then becomes unity, indicating perfect order. Summarily, “Since the entropy of the system is dependent upon the probability distribution of the elements to be found in certain distinguishable states, it is clear that [in a self-organizing system] this probability distribution must change such that H is reduced.”

The formula thus leads to a simple criterion: if the system is self-organizing, then the rate of change of R should be positive (i.e. dR/dT > 0). To apply the formula, however, R. must be computed for both the system and the environment, since their respective entropies are coupled. Since there are several different ways for the system’s entropy to decrease in relation to the entropy of the environment, von Foerster refers to the agent responsible for thee changes in the former as the “internal demon” and the agent responsible for changes in the latter as the “external demon.” These two demons work interdependently, in terms of both their efforts and results. For the system to be self-organizing, the criterion that must be satisfied is now given by the formula. (55 – 57)

We thus get two extremes. In the case of absolute entropy where R is equal to zero, we have the absence of a new object, but rather only a mere aggregate of objects. Where, by contrast, the position of each sub-object is perfectly determinate such that entropy is equal to zero, we would have what might be called an “absolute object”. This would be an object where entropy has been completely banished.

Of course, the interesting question resides not so much in the equation that allows us to determine the entropy embodied in an object or the degree of order possessed by an object, but rather lies in determining the mechanisms by which this self-organization takes place. These mechanisms will differ depending on the sorts of objects we’re investigating. It will not be the same for rocks, stars, electrons, giraffes, academic disciplines, political groups, nations, and so on. All of these entities, it goes without saying, are negentropic in their own way and stave off their entropy in a variety of ways. However, it’s also interesting to note that because we have a variety of gradations between absolute non-objects (mere aggregates) and absolute objects, we also get the beginnings of an account here of both why objects change and become new objects as a result of the entropy they continue to harbor within themselves and the entropy they encounter in their environments. Here we encounter the order from noise principle, where noise at the heart of objects, as Melanie Doherty has recently argued, might function as the impetus for both the dissolution of certain objects and the emergence of new objects.

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14 Responses to “Towards a Theory of the Self-Organization of Objects”

There might be an issue here, in that physicists are pretty sure on the conclusion that entropy will lead to a void of nothingness in the universe.

They’re talking trillions of years of course: but basically, its the latter stages of the universe where all the stars have imploded, the black holes will fade away, all the white dwarfs and the black dwarfs after them will be subject to entropy, all there will be is a sea of inert protons.

Perhaps a theory of objects may stand up to this universal object of high entropy (almost like a desert of protons), but you may have to contend with entropy scientists throwing this back at you with nihilistic glee ” No new objects here!”

Needless to say, if they are right, its a good time to exist, as the same entropy laws that give birth to us ‘as’ objects will take it away again.

What one should keep in mind is that when you `subtract` the noise from your object: you don’t necessarily get the `absolute` object, where redundancy R is unity. I wanted to stress it, because there is a common misconception of noise as being the indeterminate. While it is not! As your post suggests, on the contrary, it might be the most critical part for the object to transform / appear or disappear. Then the question arises how the noise can be defined in this context. Is it indeterminate? Nope. Is it unwanted? Nope. On the contrary, it is unthinkable for me to think any phenomena without any noise. Then it’s gotta be necessary. Is it something uncorrelated with the “object without noise” (the thing you get via the subtraction operation)? This, I am not sure. But it seems to me it might not be necessarily so. Every object might have their signature through noise, then how could the noise element be uncorrelated to what it contaminates?

This is quick thoughts coming from signal processing point of view. I am not sure I could correlate well with your post, but it was sure a great read.

Just a quick note…I’m sure you are aware of Schrodinger’s ‘What is life’ in which he proposes a negentropic ‘definition’ of life:

ORGANIZATION MAINTAINED BY
EXTRACTING ‘ORDER’ FROM THE ENVIRONMENT
How would we express in terms of the statistical theory the marvellous faculty of a living organism, by which it delays the decay into thermodynamical equilibrium (death)? We said before: ‘It feeds upon negative entropy’, attracting, as it were, a stream of negative entropy upon itself, to compensate the entropy increase it produces by living and thus to maintain itself on a stationary and fairly low entropy level.

Schrodinger, W.I.L. (avail. on the web).

Also Stengers has a whole tome of Cosmopolitics dedicated to “La vie et l’artifice': visages de ‘l’emergence’.
She discusses the question of emergence in some detail incl refs to Simondon, Deleuze and the usual suspects.

Mario Crocco also discusses living systems as negentropic in the essay Palindrome (web). He complicates the story by arguing that psyches do not emerge, but eclose or ‘pop-out’ into existence (a bit like ‘particles’ – quantum of action):

I will begin by explaining a key scientific concept which declares that living organisms flourish as a means to dull by the quickest way the shine reflected by their environment. The concept, polished in the branch of physics called generalized thermodynamics, became important way away of this specialized sector; put into precise – far more opaque – technical words, it announces that biospheric differentiation optimizes the disordering of planetary albedo on the shortest path.

This concept deals with the ever growing diversity of living beings and states why this diversity grew continuously throughout the evolution of life on earth, forming new plants and animals – including us. All living organisms play a part in a dynamics in which each element does its work nested sequentially inside other elements – like Russian Matryoshka or nesting dolls. Because of this sequential nesting or encaptic order of the dynamics, orchestrated chemical reactions are composed first; they form organs; the organs form biological organisms, which form their biocenoses or communities, which in turn form global ecological arrays. To state this key concept of natural science another way: the evolutionary diversification of the biosphere (or balanced system of living beings and surroundings) into nested organizations apportions the planet’s exiting energy (albedo, the glare that the planet sheds into space) as fast as it can into photons (the light waves, or “grains of light” forming that glare) in their greatest physically feasible numbers with the longest (dubbed “reddest”) physically feasible wavelength.
And this is why the diversity of living beings has grown continuously through evolutionary times – bringing about the natural selection of brains and of their opportune production of different sensations and sentiments in the subjective existences, or finite psyches, that find themselves in those brains.

Anway, the idea that some objects come into being as wholes is inter esting

I have a few questions (in the form of positions I’ll venture). I pose them less to counter, than to attempt to understand. Thanks for bearing with me.

I was on a run when it donned on me that these three central tenets resonated with the properties if words themselves. 1) “That objects are always composed of other objects”; words are of course conglomerates or parts of other words in a language, and of other languages 2) “That objects exist at all levels of scale”; I don’t know exactly how you’re using ‘scale’, but I interpret this as the linguistic insight that every word only has a meaning in relation to all the other words in the language, such that we could say that each word essentially exists in every other word, that every word is a word for another word, etc. (“The signifier represents the subject of/for another signifier”) 3) “That objects are negentropic in that they both resist dissolution and perpetually face the problem of dissolution or entropy”; there would be many ways to go on this point. You could say that a word resists dissolution insofar as it is “used” and dissolves insofar as it falls into dissuse (“dead languages”). Or you could point to non-creative uses of words as also causing their ‘dissolution’ and point to creative uses as safeguards (almost!) against their dissolution.

What these comments aim to acknowledge is the degree to which “There is no object without the word for it.” Or better said: “There’s no way an object could be the object it is without the word we use to ‘reference’ it.” To give an example, consider a book. What is a book for a dog? Certainly, it’s an object, and the dog needs no words to chew it to pieces or slobber all over it as he would any dog toy (or disregard it entirely and use it as a toilet). I think it is a serious question for OOO to answer what makes that same object different to/for “me” (is this where emergency comes in? noise? “self-organization”?). I would add that no book is the same book for any one person: if I hand the girl across the room my copy of Fleurs du Mal, she looks at it like its a stone, totally uninterested, bored (partially because she can’t read French, though she can read the English), where as I read it often to practice my French, learn about French poetry, etc. How do we account for this ‘same’ object being such a different object all at once? …So even on a basic level, a book isn’t differentiated as a book until something interacts with it as a book (and the criteria for doing so might seem more obscure than we think). That ‘same object’ is just a doggie-pad, or an annoying or ignorable conglomerate of paper, or a tool for learning French, or a textbook inspiration for a 20th century Surrealist, etc.

I raise this because the status of ‘object’ seems taken for granted a bit too often. It seems to me that the point at which an object is differentiated as such is when something else interacts with it, and when this always involved degrees of (non-) recognition. How does an object have any sort of consistency at this point when the ‘thing’ (in my case, the subjectivity?) interacting with it determines what it is?

I’m not sure how noise fits in here, if we’re saying it is the impetus for dissolution and emergence. I’m tempted to say that what’s written in a book (or the book itself) is nothing but noise (state of seamless surface ‘stuff’) until I name it a book, or until I pick it up and turn that noise into something meaningful “to me.” Is it that I bring a certain amount of noise along with me, which resonates with the noisiness of the book? I’m hard pressed not to think that the notions of language and interpretation have to come into these considerations of ‘objects’ and I’m unclear how OOO does that insofar as its express goal seems to envision a ‘flat ontology’ where objects don’t exist for humans alone– is it that recognizing the object as ‘book’ is epistemological and not ontological?

What makes Fleurs du Mal something more than just noise and nonsense for me, and not for the girl sitting across the room? The element of the meaning I can garner from the object (but due to what??) seems to change what the object is, albeit somewhat retroactively. I don’t see how it would be any different than with a “football”: If Peyton Manning holds a football, and then I hold it, can we really say we’re holding the same ‘object’?

If, “The emergence of an object is accompanied by a decrease in entropy,” does this mean that Manning himself decreases the entropy of the football insofar as he learns the skill of tossing it, just as I decrease the entropy of Fleurs du Mal when learning French (among countless other activities) such that it ‘becomes the object that it is’?

Are there objects/things that do not have a corresponding word? And if so, how could we possibly talk about them, or designate them, or theorize them? How could you even prove this one way or another, since, in order to do so, you’d be speaking? (And in a language that would be a matter of indifference for both the dog and the girl across the room)

I see an answer in the idea that an object is always withdrawn from itself, but this seems linked to language as well. The dog pees on a ‘hydrant’, but the fact that it is a hydrant withdraws from the dog. In calling it a hydrant and recognizing it as such, we prevent it from withdrawing. But again, it seems like its words that prevent the ‘hydrant as hydrant’ from withdrawing into the mere undifferentiated bumps and bruises of raw matter (nothing).

I’m afraid that my questions have run far afield of the concerns of OOO, but my initial sense is that they are pertinent. What is my computer to an ant but a large plastic desert territory? But this is so misleading, because we would have already brought the ant into language, which it does not have. “Large plastic desert territory” can only exist for someone who can understand or imagine that phrase. Only the change in texture would possibly registered, and in a sensible way. The element of recognizing objects seems tied to language inextricably… but there’s no way to speak of an object without recognizing it.

@fragilekeys
This is certainly a perplexing issue that many have meditated on many times! Maturana and Heidegger come to mind…and Wittgenstein?
For Maturana (when he used to write about this) and poss. H.; non-languaging animals do not live in a world of objects….’non-languaging’ has a technical sense for Maturana: second order recursions in coordinations of acts…He would also claim that ‘animals’ are effectively behaving as we behave when we say in lang. that we did something ‘unconsciously’.
Uexkull does have an umwelt/object world for animals
My own current ‘issue’ is that, yes wholes may truly ‘withdraw’ – or can only be known by way of their qualities – but what of objects that are not naturally occurring unities (not wholes/unum per se)?
A constructed table (rather than a tree trunk used as a table) does have a certain unity – but it is not that of a naturally occurring object. I am led to wonder if the ‘unity’ of a table can in fact be known….we can know its ‘organization’….
I’m not sure on all this! It is the difference between ipseity and cadacualtez.

“Submarines and rocks exist as microphysical dynamic organizations built up to macroscopic scale;
psyches rather are originally one and cadacualtic each.” (Mario crocco).

Aquinas is clear that we do not know ‘substantial forms’ – they are known by way of their accidents (indiv characteristics) – ‘but there is nothing to stop us from taking congeries of accidents as standing for differences of substance’…Summa theologiae 1.77.1 ad 7

Languages are real, and are objects or systems themselves, so they do have agency. But they are not sovereign, which is where object-oriented thought radically departs from the kind of linguistic idealism you discuss above.

Also, Levi once had a very similar view, and I, too, would once have agreed with what you have written above. Much of this very blog is dedicated to working out these very problems. I recommend taking a stroll through some of the discussions and posts over the past couple of years. Your questions have been addressed directly in several different ways.

I’d like to defend myself against the claim of “linguistic idealism,” though I admit that my use of the dog examples might suggest it. I understand linguistic realism to say that there is nothing that exists outside of our talk about it; likewise, that all of reality is a ‘play of signifiers'; that the only ‘real differences in objects’ are those differences that are introduced by language itself, etc. The ‘radically different’ turn that you say OOO accomplishes is just to say that objects exist before we ‘know about them’ as name of that object; along with the desire to combat a human-centric view that subordinates objects to a (supposedly human) language, and therefore to think of objects as being before or even indifferently to the “for-us”.

I come at these questions from an different place, namely, that there is no such thing as language. First, language is not an ‘object'; if anything, it is an open-ended system with certain norms but also with a great deal of malleability. If it were an object, then you’d have to tell me where it is; but the minute you tried to do that, you’d be committed to saying that it’s everywhere– no? Secondly, nothing about language is ‘a given.’ More importantly, the point that we can talk about things that supposedly pre-exist our talk about them changes what those things are– they don’t make them “for humans” or “for language,” but in an more open-ended way “for us” (all “objects” are “for” all other objects).

The point of Lacan’s statement “The universe is a flower of rhetoric” isn’t that there is no universe before we started conjecturing about it. The point is that the pre-rhetorical universe wasn’t the ‘universe’ that now exists “is.” With the extrapolation of scientific observation, not to mention the experimental cosmologies of religion and early epic verse, that pre-rhetorical universe becomes something much more than it was… it begins to be what is “is.” And that “something more” is for us. That said, this “us” is precisely what is the MOST undetermined ‘thing’ that there is (truly, what could it not encompass?). I’m astonished by the degree to which this “us” is taken for granted as a pre-determined category– i.e., it means “for humans,” or “for the marketplace,” or whatever. But isn’t it the “us”– the attitudes of the “us”– that matter the most here? Even in combating a human-centric view of things, isn’t it for the sake of “our view of things”?!?

Rocks in the asteroid belt won’t read these theories!

The real irony of the OOO position, insofar as it wants for a non-human-centric view, I’ve yet to see how this desire isn’t itself “for us.” If it doesn’t retain a dimension of this, isn’t it pure nihilism or laissez-faire? What is the reason to act, to fight against injustice, if “thereness” in its non-evaluated “thereness” is to be the priority? It’s true that, as Levi writes, “Thereness is indifferent to human existence. It is not a thereness for us, but a thereness of being.” Something like AIDS or cancer is just there, absolutely indifferent to us. The point is that we realize that it is for us. Without realizing that it is there for us, as a question of all of our existences, why wouldn’t we too remain indifferent? Shouldn’t the point be to focus on the things that DO relate to us, that DO matter to us? And invariably, isn’t that what OOO is doing, no matter what it says to the contrary?

Politically, there is a profound indifference to things of which, in a way, this seems to be the philosophy. I discuss with someone for whom human conflicts, the environmental crises, even literature, mean nothing, have no point. They don’t see what the point is “for them.” Instead of reiterating how things aren’t “for us” (which seems to be reacting against a philosophical strawman), to prove how objects and “us” are inextricably tied, and thus to emphasize this “for us” more than ever? (I.e., isn’t the point to see that the bombs being dropped on Libyan civilians aren’t just “there”?)

Well, I’m sure I’ve misunderstood most of OOO. I’ll keep reading, no doubt. I’d just caution against a philosophical/theoretical perspective that loses touch with “our world” (which, without getting into it, is NOT, in my view, a “human world”).

I feel like the real goal is to stop subjugating objects to the “human utility” or the “utility of capitalism.” But that wouldn’t mean our relation to objects isn’t any less important, but even more important. Instead, objects are ‘enlisted’ under a ‘labor of difference': “The transportation of difference never takes place in a smooth, frictionless space, but always requires labour or work. Through the work of translation, objects can always enlist other objects for their own ongoing autopoiesis.” I’d say all of this is frustratingly contradictory, in the end.

[…] Fragilekeys arguing for an antirealist position, and Joseph Goodson arguing for a realist position (here, here, and here). In my view, OOO doesn’t fit easily with any of these positions (and here […]

Naturally occurring objects. I was trying to distinguish between basically ‘man-made’ objects and objects that exist without being made by man….submarine/rock….

But it doesn’t matter.

The thesis of withdrawal stands for unities/wholes.

However, there are still different kinds of identity/unities….

Psyches are both one and not-another (cadacualtic). Non empsyched beings like a tree or a rock are one (they have a certain unity or ipseity/organizing principle) but are not cadacualtic. Psyches are not neutral exchangeable substances. As you know, there is also no democracy of objects in Harman’s OOO.

‘By its denoting one’s determination to sustain constitutive causal exchanges with a fixed parcel of nature, rather than one’s existentiality having, instead, eclosed to any other constitutive brain or circumstance, cadacualtez is a concept somehow akin to philosopher Martin Heidegger’s (1889-1976) notion of Jemeinigkeit (see below, Translations), yet differing from this. The concept of cadacualtez assumes that in nature a diversity of psyches is localized, e.g. in the organisms of human beings, dogs, or apes – but not in mountains or pines, not either as a general subjectivity or “world soul” (a thesis that is called panpsychism, the view that all matter has consciousness).
‘As it is widely known, the psyches, minds or existentialities found in nature differ among themselves as they develop different inner mental contents. For example, each human being learns different things, a dog or a seal is acquainted with a certain person or has learnt certain abilities while another dog or seal instead did not, etc. There is no scientific doubt that psyches differ in regard to their mental contents. Yet, do they also differ intrinsically, before starting to distinguish knowledges, i.e. before beginning to learn? The question is important because, if they did not differ intrinsically, it would be possible to think that mind or psyche is a common material (“consciousness”), akin to water or gold, from which samples are taken that afterward adopt diverse shapes: gold may take the shape of a ring or a coin, water that of a drinking glass or a bottle, such a supposed “consciousness” that of this or that cognoscitive development – to give examples. This idea of mental contents as not inseparably belonging (“inhering”) to a particular psyche, existentiality, mind or soul is reflected in a notion of “consciousness” not seldom seen in modern textbooks in English: namely, “consciousness” as a natural element, fungible like gold or water, the different samples from which are to take, along some development, different shapes…….. (Mario Crocco, http://knol.google.com/k/cadacualtez-or-why-one-is-not-another#).

Btw, the concept of vicarious causality existed throughout the latin schools in their theory of cognition – particularly in the theory of the ‘species’ or specifying forms. They are the vicars of the thing and were specifically called vicarious…
The basic outline of the theory of species can be found in Deely, ‘New Beginnings’ (or my ‘The Primacy of Semiosis’, chpter 3). Some determination must, of necessity supervene upon the knower..
The species are the means whereby a given entity affects its surroundings by way of some specific energy (light, heat, sound, movement, shape). There is a vicarious ‘specification’ of the sensory powers.
This theory was only applied by the latins to cognitive organisms but could be extended to include thing-thing relations….
Graham may have indeed coined the phrase ‘vicarious causality’ – the schools used ‘extrinsis formal causality’.

‘A specifying form essentially is representative and vicarious of the object on which a cognitive power depends in its specification’
(John Poinsot [John of St Thomas], Tractatis de Signis, 1632). Trans. by John Deely, univ of california press, 1985

There are many things I want to address in your response, but I feel that, since you are new to OOO, I also want to wait till you are more familiar with its aims and concepts before I respond. I think several of the problems with OOO written above (and from your post on your blog) might dissolve, or at least hopefully change, once you become more familiar with the ontology itself.

For instance, you write:

“The ‘radically different’ turn that you say OOO accomplishes is just to say that objects exist before we ‘know about them’ as name of that object”

…which is saying that OOO is just average, banal epistemological realism, which it isn’t at all.

[…] a substance or unity and a swarm. And it is for this reason that each object faces the problem of entropy from within, or the manner in which the sub-multiples or objects within the larger scale object threaten the […]